For years, Indian Ocean piracy, narcotics trafficking, and arms smuggling were treated as separate crimes. Today, they form a single, interlocking economy. Methamphetamine from Pakistan’s Makran coast, diesel smuggled through Gwadar, and illegal weapons moving along the same sea lanes now blur the line between criminal enterprise and strategic coercion.

In the western Indian Ocean, analysts increasingly describe this as a hybrid threat: illicit networks that generate profit, destabilise governance, and serve the strategic interests of state-aligned actors. The route that once carried Afghan heroin and Pakistani meth to the Gulf is now a multi-commodity corridor, moving everything from small arms to sanctioned oil under the cover of stateless fishing boats.

The Makran–Gulf Nexus

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